Slashdot Mirror
British ISPs Embracing Two-Tier Internet
Barence writes "Britain's leading ISPs are attempting to construct a two-tier internet, where websites and services that are willing to pay are thrust into the 'fast lane,' while those that don't are left fighting for scraps of bandwidth or even blocked outright. Asked directly whether ISP TalkTalk would be willing to cut off access completely to BBC iPlayer in favor of YouTube if the latter was prepared to sign a big enough cheque, TalkTalk's Andrew Heaney replied: 'We'd do a deal, and we'd look at YouTube and we'd look at BBC and we should have freedom to sign whatever deal works.' Britain's biggest ISP, BT, meanwhile says it 'absolutely could see situations in which some content or application providers might want to pay BT for a quality of service above best efforts.' PC Pro asks if it's the end of the net as we know it."
Clearly, you are misunderstanding the purpose of 21st century governments. The purpose of your government is to ensure that corporations and their shareholders become wealthier.
Palm trees and 8
"Best effort" in networking terminology is the priority given to traffic that isn't specifically prioritised or limited. There's nothing wrong with what he's saying.
I work for a company that is heavy involved (among other things) in just that sort of deep packet inspection technology. If you don't think that large ISPs are (or will shortly be) doing traffic shaping, you're a fool.
Except for the fact that it doesn't make any sense. How can it be the "best effort" if something can be prioritised ahead of it?
It makes perfect sense. When a QoS scheme is being designed; traffic is divided into classes, and (typically) each class is assigned to queues based on priority; each queue has a certain size.
The class that is not associated with any priority queue at all is called "best effort". The reason it is called best effort, is, unlike other traffic classes -- there is no priority or reservation.
Other traffic has priority in the form of something close to a guarantee; meaning, if prioritized traffic does not exceed the size of the priority queue, it is guaranteed to be delivered even in the face of congestion. Whereas the remaining traffic is just "best effort".
The traffic that is best effort will be delivered if possible (in the face of congestion), but it might be dropped, best effort is weaker than guaranteed priority.